


Claw Your Way Out

by folie_a_yeux



Series: Kolya and Winston [2]
Category: Hannibal (TV), Hannibal Lecter Tetralogy - Thomas Harris
Genre: Crack Treated Seriously, Gen, Hannibal fails at pets, Man's Best Serial Killer, Morbid Yet Adorable, Other, Poor Will, Well That Got Dark Fast
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-19
Updated: 2013-07-19
Packaged: 2017-12-20 17:44:51
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,487
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/890055
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/folie_a_yeux/pseuds/folie_a_yeux
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>THE SEQUEL TO SINK YOUR CLAWS IN: Winston isn't prepared for his first hunting trip with Kolya. Abigail isn't prepared for the choices Will forces her to make. And Hannibal isn't prepared for what Winston finds in his kitchen... or, more precisely, who.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Claw Your Way Out

**Author's Note:**

> Chapter II of the Kolya and Winston Series.

“Look, Kolya.” Scratching behind the ears. “A friend has come to see us.” 

It whines. Scrabbles at the doors. Wants comfort, closeness. Feels — tastes the concept, spits it out — obligation. Affection. Need.

So. A new Toy. 

Delicious.

***

new place new smell harsh grass, clawing at paws, pounding cracked earth

rushing now bounding after, so free so free and catch catch catch catch it, before strange grey cat-thing reaches it, but first running running running and wind wind wind

and love for new master, better master, kinder better feeding better comfort, a master who never forgets him, never abandons him, warmth not cold food not starve inside not abandoned and forgotten and lost

but no time, no time, new place new smells, new ground hard ground lake ground, and rabbit smell, warren smell, closer closer closer circling almost to it now, and then snapping at heels and fur in teeth and rush of hunt and whimpering pleasure from the chase when

New smell.

same but different, rabbit smell but not rabbit smell, pup smell, small vulnerable rabbit pups, fun catch throw, no hunger yet but catch throw catch throw catch throw find and then

***

Not-Seen. Not-Smelled. Waiting.

Amusing to watch them. Track their Not-Seeing, Not-Smelling. Hear little hearts beat, little blood coursing. Exposed in the hard grass. Known scent. Rabbit scent.

Let the Dog catch. Let the Dog run. Much easier prey, here. Lasting much longer. 

***

no no no

no no no no no

no words no sounds no dog-thoughts except Bad Dog and Stop, human words loud words shouting unheard against skull 

not a game, this cat-stalking, not play, not chase and release but crawl and hunt, and hunger not hunger and fear fear fear 

watches as cat pounces and cradles and releases and brings back, not food with game but food as game and not senses living and rejoicing but curling, curving like snake teeth, like the snakes under master’s porch, teeth pointed and deadly and waiting and waiting and waiting

***

Crunch.

***

“It’s natural to be upset, Will. But to measure her against human expectations, human standards, would be unfair.”

Will rakes a hand through his hair, curls tangled and snarling. He crouches over the sink, head bent up, looking out the window to where Abigail lays with Kolya in the grass.

“She was playing with them. They were terrified, and she knew it, somehow.” He grimaces. “She made them suffer before they died. It was a game. And you think that’s normal?”

“For her, yes.” Hannibal observes Will’s hunched posture, cataloguing the wrinkles in his shirt, the stains on his jeans, returning to the shallots at hand. “This is how animals behave, Will. This is how animals eat.”

“I find it... cruel.”

“A human emotion. A human word.” 

Hannibal uses the flat of the knife to shift the shallots to one side. He moves to the potatoes glistening on the cutting board nearby. Before he can reach them, Will shoves his hands against the counter, rocking back, takes up a knife and begins to cut. He’s not terrible at it.

“Be honest with yourself, Will.” He slices into a carrot lengthwise, lining up the halves for a proper demie-coute. “Is it the fact that she enjoys hunting what bothers you, or what it was she killed?”

“Kittens.” Will’s smiles and his grimaces are beginning to look more and more alike. “Baby rabbits are called kittens.”

“And so much the better.” Hannibal catches Will’s eye. Holds it. Releases him. “For the order of things. What would have happened if Kolya, or Winston for that matter, had killed their mother? Then all her kittens would die, and she would not be there to make more. All of them would suffer.”

He raises a hand, returns it to the board. Lifts it again, and puts it on Will’s shoulder. It rests easy there. Natural.

“I’ve been meaning to introduce you and Abigail to a proper lapin a la cocotte,” he says. “And you could use something heartier than my usual fare. I’ll cook them in a stew.”

Will barks out a laugh. Looks at him. Pales.

“Why? So we can honor every part of it?” His sarcasm would be rude if it weren’t the blanket Will drapes himself in, a way to muffle the words scratching at the door. 

“Yes.” Hannibal turns Will to face him, keeping the hand on his shoulder. Gently, he places the other down, close to Will’s neck. Tantalizing. He can feel the heat radiating off of him. His curls brush over Hannibal’s palms. 

“We don’t want any of it to go to waste. And you’ll feel better knowing their mother won’t see the bodies when she returns.” He wipes his hands on his apron, rolls his sleeves past his elbows, heads to the kitchen door. When he reaches it, he turns back.

“Believe me,” Hannibal says, and he, usually so precise in his meanings, cannot tell if the voice he adopts is sardonic, condescending, or even pitying. “You’ll like the food better when you cannot see its face.”

***

Abigail Hobbs turns her face to the light, hair caught in a twisted braid, neck knotted with a red and blue scarf. 

She keeps the knot tight now, to stop her fingers clawing. Once her nails were bitten through, ragged and bloodied and crippled by sharp white teeth; now they’re the sharp ones, sharp nails on long fingers digging and fidgeting and rearranging. Changing.

Abigail can smell him before she sees him, an almost feminine smell, musk-like, with something sharper underneath. Kolya opens one complacent eye and yawns. 

“What a naughty girl.”

Hannibal reaches across Abigail and picks Kolya up by the scruff of the neck. He examines her impassively, inspecting her teeth and blood-caked claws. 

“Our little Kolya gave Will quite a shock this morning.” Placing Kolya in the crook of his arm, Hannibal runs a finger down her body, head to tail. The cat stretches luxuriously. “It seems she is once again in our friend’s black books. He’s run off with Winston now to get away from us both.”

Abigail presses her lips together and tugs at the end of her braid. “I don’t understand what he has against her. You know he shouldn’t even be allergic to her? Russian Blues aren’t supposed to make people react. It’s not like she can create her own dander...”

Hannibal looks at Kolya with an expression that would pass for rueful in less discerning company. Abigail pretends not to notice. It’s not hard — Hannibal isn’t used to being marked, just admired — and she has more important things to worry about.

“And he’s getting sicker.” She swallows, hard. Looks up at Hannibal. “He’s saying things. Sometimes he really scares me.”

Hannibal stops his petting and grows still, a statue of a statue. Kolya looks up and gives an angry mrow. 

“What has he been saying to you, Abigail?”

She steels herself. Steel on steel on steel, strong and brittle, unbendable if breakable. 

“He’s started taking me on fishing trips. At first it was kind of fun. He has this way of... when he lets himself be, you feel like you can be there, too. Like if you pull back or open up, he’ll follow you, he’ll understand. Like he doesn’t want to watch you, he just wants to be with you. I’ve missed that.” 

“But then?”

It feels like a betrayal. Like tearing into Will, picking him apart, cataloguing him like the frogs she’d cut up in bio lab, like the therapists at group, filing and labeling and reducing the whole to its parts, making a clean thing dirty.

She swallows. 

“Sometimes he’ll forget where we are. Sometimes I’m not sure if he sees me, or if he hears what I’m saying. He doesn’t really eat. He never sleeps. And last week...” She tilts her head back, tugs at the scarf, wills the panic of the memory down. “He was convinced someone had moved all his lures. He wouldn’t stop talking about it. He made me touch them. Said they felt different, felt wrong. He started shouting, and I couldn’t get him to stop. I ran. I don’t think he even noticed when I left.”

Abigail blinks then, and feels hot tears slice her cheeks. Red-hot. Damning. She gets up, turns her face away, brushes them roughly off with her hand. She can hear nothing, feel nothing from him, and is scared to look, scared she’s said too much, scared she’s about to lose another father, another link, another another life.

“I don’t know what to do.”

And then she feels his hand on her shoulder, and before she can remember how she’s already made it into his arms, Kolya letting out an indignant yowl before jumping to the ground. His arms wrap around her as she cries on his suit.

“Listen to me, Abigail.” She feels his breath tickling hair against her cheek, hears the scratch of jacket against vest, tastes the salt in her mouth. She clings to these sensations as she would cling to an anchor, as he rests his chin against her head and looks out at the lake behind his house. 

“Will doesn’t know what he feels right now. My job is to help him regain some of the balance he’s lost by working with Jack Crawford. And I will help, in whatever way I can.” He lays his lips on the top of her head. Gives her a small kiss, holding her in, holding her together. “Just as you help him.”

She hasn’t felt so without mooring, so weak, in such a long time, in so so long. Anything to scrub the sensation off her now, to scrape it away. To expose it. To erase it.

“How? By reminding him of the monster he killed?”

“No.” He moves back to look her over, holding her shoulders in his hands, supporting her, rooting her. “By showing him there are more than just monsters in this world.”

***

He’s back in the kitchen when it happens, stripping down the flesh left on the kits Kolya slaughtered. 

Hannibal senses it. Stiffens. Turns. “Ah.”

Winston crouches in the corner, not still but stilled, so wolf in this moment that Hannibal forgets to remember this is a dog, a domestic thing, tamed. The cool of the deep freezer still frosts the air, the extra bits he’s been adding to fill out the soup still spread on the cutting board, the bloodied knives still laid neatly one next to the other. 

Winston smells it. He remembers.

A dog’s nose is far stronger than a human’s, far stronger than a cat’s. It can pick up the smallest scent, the slightest change. In temperature, in pheromones, in the most basic compositional shifts. Who you are. What you were. Where you’ve been, and whose blood is all over your hands.

The dog’s eyes grow large, and a growl bubbles up the back of his throat. His front paws scrabble the clean tile of the floor.

“Now, now,” Hannibal murmurs. He uses the flat of the knife nearest him to lift the corner of the meat he’d harvested those short months before, carefully stripped of everything human senses could track. “Is that any way to thank me, for getting you to our Will? For setting you free, when your master forgot you again? For bringing you to that road, to your new home, after I had... dealt with him?” 

Hannibal runs the knife through the center of the meat, pleased to see it thawed perfectly through. 

“He was unfit,” he whispers, “as a master and as a man.” Runs one finger along the knife’s edge. Brings it to his mouth. Licks it clean. “But your new master is in no danger of ending up on my table. Yet.”

The animal hankers down, pressing his weight to the front of his paws, leaning in. Ears back, teeth bared. A single snarl. A threat. A promise. 

When Hannibal looks up again, Winston is gone. 

Clean kills, and messy hunts. He frowns at a mass of meat and fur at the neck of Kolya’s smallest poach. Sloppy. Something to teach her, to train her to avoid. To resist the extra thrill, to hold back when it might leave a trace. A trail.

Sloppy.

***

The soup is delicious, Will has to admit.

They sit on the edge, he and Abigail dangling pale feet over dark water. Hannibal stays safely on the grass, spooning hot broth into Kolya and Winston’s bowls, and it is only after Abigail spreads out a fresh blanket, after he’s laid his coat, shoes and socks a safe distance away, that he deigns to join them on the dock. Even so, Will knows he wouldn’t be there if it weren’t for them.

“Oh, come on.” Will is stuffed equally with rabbit stew and phlegm. The soup floods through them, the water below murky and cool and so, so deep. “You call that affection? Cats don’t care about their owners. They like you because you’re useful to them. They’re affectionate when you amuse them.” He runs his free hand under Winston’s neck, and the dog’s tail thumps against the planks, in everyone’s way without really moving. “There’s nothing real there. Not like this.”

Winston strains to lick hot breath on Will’s cheeks, and his nose snags on the smell near the dock’s edge, where the ground is mouldering soft. He whines briefly, nostrils flared, eyes wide, and shoves his head under Will’s arm, nuzzling into him, inhaling dog and fish and cheap aftershave and something deeper, too.

Kolya observes him from her position between Hannibal and Abigail, squeezed just between them for maximum attention and warm. Purrs. Interesting, this Meat, she thinks. Powerless when freed. Powerful when cornered. 

“There is as great a spectrum of selfish emotion as in selflessness, Will,” Hannibal says softly. “Egoists are just less in need of replenishment. They do not starve, because they do not give all they have to others.”

Abigail shoots him a look, a look she’s grateful only Hannibal sees.

“Well... who’s your favorite, Abigail?” Will’s trying to tease her now. He has the feel of someone who’d be very good at teasing, if he weren’t trying so hard to use it as a mask. “Which one do you like better? Cats or dogs?” 

Abigail Hobbs takes a deep breath of lake air. She looks down at Kolya, purring in Hannibal’s arms, and at Winston, head resting on Will’s jeans. 

She thinks of the two men who risked everything to free her, instead of just realizing she could always have freed herself, these two men shackling her with love and grief and power and desire, this father who killed her father and this new father she knows is just like him.

"Both," she says, and is surprised how strong her voice is. She looks over at Will, up at Hannibal, and smiles. "I like them both."


End file.
